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BROCKVILLE, Ont. – Being fat isn't necessarily unhealthy, but being obsessed with staying thin definitely is, according to a Canadian obesity expert.

“The fear of being fat is overwhelming,” said Dr. Deborah McPhail, an expert in health and obesity from Memorial University of Newfoundland. “Young girls have indicated they are more afraid of becoming fat than they are of cancer, nuclear war or losing their parents.”

McPhail was speaking to an audience at a Fat Talk Free Week event in Brockville, Ont., sponsored by Girls Incorporated.

“Many people are concerned with obesity because it is unhealthy,” said McPhail. “But the idea itself of obesity being unhealthy is negative.”

To a degree, she said, healthy eating and exercising have become part of our culture’s obsession with fat avoidance.

“These dominant ideas are having disastrous effects on women's body image,” she said, indicating that 52% of girls begin dieting before the age of 14.

But McPhail, along with many other doctors, has taken up an alternative perspective that challenges the idea of excess fat being unhealthy.

This challenge is difficult to overcome based on media messages alone.

The BBC has called obesity “a time bomb.” The World Health Organization defines obesity as abnormal or excessive fat. National Geographic printed a special edition titled “The Heavy Cost of Fat.”

These few examples flow right into the notion of more people becoming obese, she said. However, according to McPhail along with other scholars and the medical community, the data is overstated.

“Our measurement for obesity, being BMI, is flawed. It doesn't account for musculature,” said McPhail, who showed the room that under this measurement, actor George Clooney would be considered obese. “This challenges the notion of obesity as an epidemic.”

What's more, she said, obesity is not necessarily bad for you.

“Obese people can be healthy just as thin people can be unhealthy,” she said. “The gain and loss of weight of overweight people is what's unhealthy.”

A new measurement for obesity is slowly making its way to physicians. It is called Edmonton Obesity Staging System (EOSS), and instead of assessing weight, it simply measures health. The EOSS defines five stages of obesity ranked according to increasing severity from stage 0 to 4.

A patient at stage 0 has obesity-related risk factors such as high blood pressure, no physical symptoms, no psychopathology, no functional limitations or impairment of well-being. In other words, the person is healthy.

The other end of the spectrum, stage 4, means the patient has severe, potentially end-stage disabilities from obesity-related chronic diseases, severe disabling psychopathology, severe functional limitations and severe impairment of well-being.

But we still, as a society, think of fat as unhealthy, McPhail warned.

“I think obesity becomes a shorthand, a way of talking about society's health problem without going into large details, such as poverty,” she said. “We should look at how do we need to change the social system.”